Love/Friendship/Barthes/Alcohol/Childhood Photo

On this, the wedding day,

of my oldest friend

joy, full to bursting, resolves in his gestures

this woman, his Wife

straight and curved as a flute

of champagne

On this day I am reminded

of a semiotician who once

drunkenly observed, of love,

“the other one never waits”

You who are such an authority

on loves, their hollowing,
the fullness and collapse of them,

Will you call me tomorrow after work

and ask me to come be near you?

Will we swap swigs from a bottle of red

and laugh at our stained tongues?

We scatter into pieces, so completely

intermingled

they can only resemble some Unity

quite as immune to loneliness

as the girl from the picture

who tumbles barefoot through the grass

after the ceremony

who, weightless,

never waits